Around the Valley : We decided our fun-raiser would be just women. We do better with women.

“‘That’s all right,” the woman in the beige knit dress said cheerfully, looking up when she was interrupted by a man seeking his place in an expanse of tables. “A woman’s conversation just goes on and on anyway.”

This day 230 women and maybe half a dozen men were conversing lightly as they awaited lunch in the main ballroom of the Sheraton Premiere Hotel in Universal City.

They were assembled for the membership luncheon of TGI Care, the 1-year-old volunteer guild for the Rehabilitation Center at Northridge Hospital. The center works with people who are paralyzed by injuries and illness. It helps them to regain the use of their bodies if they can and to learn how to live with it if they can’t.

Beverly Korbin, an Encino housewife, started the guild after a friend of her daughter recovered from a gunshot wound at the center. Korbin noticed that the staff could use some help with simple but important tasks such as feeding patients and saying “Hi” now and then between treatment sessions.

She persuaded a few friends to volunteer one day a week.

The women also started organizing events to raise money.

They held a brunch at the hospital and in the fall tried a family outing in the Santa Monica Mountains, a Western day and starlight roundup.

“It was not a huge success,” Elaine Skaist, another guild member from Encino, said. “That’s why we decided this time our fund-raiser would be just women. We do better with women.” Skaist organized the luncheon. She made it a huge success by keeping it elegant, fun and feminine.

That was accomplished with little touches, like the centerpiece of lavender cyclamens at each table and, at each place, the perfume samples wrapped with makeup mirrors in red ribbon.

For fun Skaist raffled off gift-wrapped boxes that contained knickknacks of crystal and china. And she asked the women at each table to put a dollar into an envelope and take out a number on a small piece of paper. Later she called out numbers. With cries of delight, the winners took possession of the cyclamen centerpieces.

Besides promising such diversions, Skaist also did a lot of “wheedling and begging,” she said. Several of the friends she begged and wheedled sat at her table.

A few of them were members of her Needle Eaters club. She said her husband gave that name to her needlepoint group when he noticed that “we eat more than we needle.”

The woman in the knit beige dress was her lifelong friend, Grace Deverian.

“We were nurses together at Childrens Hospital,” Deverian said. “She married a doctor who was in residence at County Hospital.”

Deverian didn’t do badly either.

“She’s the one who always wants me to play tennis at her house when I’m volunteering in the unit,” Skaist said.

While the women were eating lunch, about a dozen models strolled back and forth on a runway in the middle of the ballroom. They were showing the wares of a store in Encino.

Store owner Cissy Wechter commented on the clothes they were wearing and told which models were married, how many children they had and, in three cases, how many grandchildren.

Her point, she said, was that “you don’t have to be rich, young, thin or even female to wear our fashions.”

In fact, one of the models was pregnant and two were teen-age brothers named John and Brad.

Wechter described the boys as good sports. They were. They walked down the runway on the arms of their mother, wearing pastel shorts that matched hers. The boys walked like wooden soldiers, but they didn’t blush.

One of the models was a little bit round in the hips. But when she came out in easy-fitting bloomers and a jacket, Skaist and Deverian cringed.

“That’s not for us,” Deverian said. “She must be a size 3 or 4. But can you see someone with big legs in those balloon pants? It wouldn’t look very nice.”

During dessert, Skaist, as if suddenly remembering a duty, glanced across the table at her daughter Pamela, who came along for the lunch.

“Pamela, you’re not eating,” she said urgently.

“I’m eating, Mom,” Pamela said, twisting her face into a rebuke. She turned her bowl around to show that half the ice cream was gone.

After the fashion show, Los Angeles School Board member Roberta Weintraub dampened the mood a little when she gave the main address.

She said only a few words about politics and then introduced a young woman named Bunny Fields, the daughter of a close friend. Not long ago, Weintraub said, Bunny had lain in a coma for 10 days at Northridge Hospital after being in a head-on collision.

“We talked to her and we screamed at her,” she said. “We did everything we could to help bring her back to life. We brought her meals and fed her every day for 30 days.”

It worked. Weintraub asked Bunny to stand up for the audience. She did. She looked thin and graceful in a long white satin dress.

Weintraub concluded by giving a plug to the mothers of people like Bunny and John and Brad. She said she had been distressed a few minutes earlier to hear someone refer to Korbin, founder of TGI Care, as a “housewife,” as if that implied a deficiency.

“Housewives run this world, as far as I am concerned,” she said.

Amen.